Pete's Log: yet another update

Entry #1055, (Life in General)
(posted when I was 22 years old.)

What has Pete been up to of late? Let's see...

Tuesday night I ended up at Rebecca's where she had a few people over. It was entertaining, we played a variety of games, including a 1981 edition of trivial pursuit.

Wednesday, a.k.a. Independence Day, I drove with Rob, Paul, and their families about an hour into Michigan to a beach on Lake Michigan. It was a very nice beach, though I was actually confused by the lack of saltwater taste when I jumped in (yes, I know I shouldn't drink the water). It's a shame, now that I've seen how nice the Lake Michigan beaches can be, that I've been here five years and just now made it there. The day was absolutely gorgeous. The water was rather cold, but that makes it all that much more fun.

Wednesday night I sought out the fireworks. I spent a while on Debartolo Quad, where the view was superb: Mars was still bright in the south, the Moon was full or nearly full, and fireworks were visible regularly. I've also been able to see (but especially hear) fireworks from my apartment.

Dr Brockman chased me down in my office Tuesday. He has some PIM microserver work for me. It sounds like really cool stuff, I need to go talk to him some more. Basically, they've figured out a lot of the low level stuff, and they've figured out a lot of the application level stuff. But they need the stuff in the middle ... a.k.a. system software. This is exciting, there's gonna be a lot of fun things to figure out.

I also forgot to mention a fun story from the USENIX vendor exhibition. We stopped by the Zzyzx Peripherals booth. They had a rack of whatever sort of stuff they make sitting in their booth, blinking prettily. I noticed among all the green and red lights, there was one row of blue lights. Intriguing. I take a closer look and ask the guy if those are really blue LEDs. You see, knowing all these cool EE types, I've heard that blue LEDs are really hard to make or something. He says they are. So I ask if they really are as expensive as I hear. He says they're not all that expensive, they only add $200 (!!!) to the cost of the system, which they feel is worth it. I never asked how much the system cost, but I'm guessing if they're willing to spend $200 on blue LEDs, the system is beyond my budget. But I gotta admit, the blue LEDs did look cool.